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So go and get some books. So I think I go to a lot of craft fairs, no matter where I am. I'm currently doing field record my dissertation, and even now I'm spending the weekends looking at hand at jewelry and antiques and large backgrounds across the Middle East. One of the big trends in jewelry in the Middle East is jewelry with Arabic font on it.
So over smoke on, poetry, calligraphy. You can custom order this stuff on Instagram, too. Jewelry designers are also, June 7th, that's quite interesting. They're going to calligraphy school to learn how to make fonts that evoke calligraphy in the designs.
But that's a question. Where did Arabic font come from to begin with? What's its relationship to calligraphy? My name is Ennam Fluid, or Nada, and I'm a graduate student at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies, and welcome to New Books and Middle East Studies.
We'll be talking sort of about the history of the book, calligraphy font, all these topics, we'll swirl together. And my guest is Halaouji, who is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Baidu with her AUB. She holds a PhD in Art History from Binghamton University, an MA in Art criticism and theory from Art Center of College of Design, and a BFA in graphic design from AUB itself. Her research interests include, amongst many, Arabic book and print culture, 19th century Islamic art and architecture, and the history modern science in Islamic world.
She's the author of a new book, Out 2016 from Burrell, Printing Arab Modernity, which is a history of the American Protestant Missions Arabic publications printed in Baidu for Ottoman readers during the 19th century, the subject of today's podcast. So welcome to the podcast, Halaouji. Thank you for having me. So I have been talking about your book nonstop for, I think roughly since July, when I read it for the first time, I can get a phenomenal addition to the growing history of the book of intellectual history.
And when I talk to people about it, they're just, they're often saying, you know, it's a very specific book, it's almost a micro history because it's so focused on the American Protestant mission. And what they printed, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, I understand, this tells this larger regional history. It's so useful to me and what I do as an aspiring intellectual historian who works on newspapers. So I congratulate you for the book, it's phenomenal.
Thank you. So we take texts in print for granted in our day and age as we do literacy. And I was just very generally, what does print culture mean to you, how would you define it? Well, yeah, I mean, print culture is those, you know, very everyday items that we take for granted, as we just said, it's, you know, print culture for all its perfusion in society today in the form of newspapers, books, magazines, booklets, posters and so on.
It's actually something that we rarely notice as a material for materiality. You know, we read and we look at this material, but unless we're told otherwise, we don't really engage with it critically. We don't really consider these items as objects for sale. Yeah, I think I was telling someone recently that my dissertation project, one manifestation of a district was born when someone handed me a pamphlet on a bus, it was on the dawn and it was some sort of pamphlet on, I think it was, you know, just various sort of benedictions or dots that you can make.
And I was just, I picked up the pamphlet and I was like, wow, this didn't exist a hundred years ago. So, and then again, we interact with texts in different ways, you know, on a screen and a book, we take it for granted. So, this is a very broad question. As people who interact with books on a regular basis or text and print, what should we notice when we look at a book?
What do you notice, specifically when you pick up a piece of text or you see something online for the first time? Right, I mean, the cliche, of course, is, you know, the books cover that we're never supposed to judge a book by the cover and so on. That somehow, you know, this attitude towards the form, it evokes the old adage that form is just supposed to follow a function or that, you know, the form of the book, it's cover, it's binding, it's the way that it's designed, it's visual conventions are not really as important as the ultimate function of the book, as a bearer of textual information. But what I like to do, or what I do, or what I do in design historians tend to do is that when working with these kinds of books, to turn a critical eye to the look of the book, you know, as readers, it's important to take notice of the other ways of reading a book, as part of our experience and interacting with it, you know, things like where do our hands go when we open the book?
You know, when you open up a book, there are these spaces, these margins, along the sides that are actually, they're intentionally for your hands, so that you wouldn't smudge ink, you wouldn't touch the ink. But why are certain margins more narrow than others? How is text arranged on the page? You know, which visual components, when you open up a book, which visual components attract their attention first?
And people like me ask the question, why is it that some parts of the book immediately call out to the reader, and what does that mean as part of the reader's experience? That's interesting just because we think of margins, I mean, we live in a day and age where the books we get printed are not necessarily going to smudge, but I definitely think of margins as a place for my notes code, or where, you know, I can scribble or I can put it and post it, and we don't think it in the same way, these things really govern our interactions with these physical objects. Yeah, and I mean, just to switch gears for a little bit, I think one of the book's strong points is the fact that you have this appreciation for sonic scripts, or speaking to another thing that governs how things evolve. And I mentioned that you have that one of your interests is 19th century Islamic art, and then you have this background in graphic design.
So how did this specific project come about? And sort of what's your intellectual history there? Yeah, so I mean, as you said, I was actually trained as a graphic designer, so I studied graphic design, and I actually worked in advertising for a bit before I decided to pursue a degree in art history. I have, I am non-traditional in the sense that I don't have an actual proper art historical undergraduate education.
So my historical interests in art is actually directly linked to my interests in the art of the book, which is in fact very much informed by my design background. When I went on to my master's at Art Center called the Design of Pasadena, I had the rare opportunity to work at a rather cutting edge letter press at that institution called Archipede Press, which, and so this is pre-sidentally had numerous old traditional letter presses that they would use to produce examples of contemporary art or take on contemporary book arts. And so it's all the design, it was like a coming together design, contemporary design, in this traditional, more traditional mode of production. And I had the opportunity to work with metal type and learn about how these kinds of things were made and how these machines work.
And I began to wonder about the history of Arabic printing. So it made sense that I would look further into this as I pursued a degree in Islam art history. And what I realized when I was doing my PhD was that one of the main problems in this field is that it's a lot of our historians paying a lot of attention to manuscripts, to things done by hand, to painting. But they didn't really consider print culture to be something that is worthy of a closer clinical scrutiny in the same way that you would look at, you know, or analyze manuscripts.
So I saw the sort of unique opportunity to change the conversation about Arabic print culture and to utilize some of the methods that our historians use, but for a study and a close analysis of print. I definitely really appreciated that just because it's a mention I work on newspapers and newspapers of all, are that period sort of the first generation of American newspapers sort of intersects with the period you're doing with the book in the 19th century. But there's so many little things that you see that are definitely, I don't wanna say hangovers, they're definitely things that evolved from this relationship with manuscript printing. And I mean, they'll use different typefaces in different areas and use tapes, or different headings, and there's a clear connection.
So I definitely appreciated that. And that's something I think we need to think more about history as continuity versus always focusing on rupture. So as I mentioned earlier, this book is specifically about the American process. And I think a lot of, you know, in history we're always tempted to sort of go bigger, to sort of especially because I'm a global history, to sort of incorporate more sources into and incorporate more archives into and incorporate more archives.
But I appreciate it with this book because it was very tight, it was very dense, very detailed work. But you also make this wide overarching claim, which I think definitely applies to much of print culture in the, with regards to the Arabic script, which is the connection between manuscript and print culture. So, but it's also about missionaries. So can you sort of set the stage for us?
What are missionaries doing at this point in the Middle East? Where's the intersection with the Ottoman Empire, which is where Lebanon is at the time? It's part of the Ottoman Empire. Right, well, this is the American process.
And that's, I mean, I'm using the colloquial name for this particular process in Arabic. And the first and foremost, a Protestant missionary was a president. The process was founded in 1834 in Beirut, but it was initially set up in an earlier form on Malta in 1831. Now, these American missionaries who founded this president, which were part of the mission to the Ottoman Syrian provinces.
Lebanon at this time was not called Lebanon is actually a part of Ottoman Syria, which is really included in modern-day Palestine and parts of Jordan and Syria and Lebanon today. And this particular mission was an extension of the Boston-based American Board of Foreign Missions, of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. And they first arrived in the area around 1820. What's interesting is that their original mission to the region was to convert Jewish and Muslim communities to Protestantism.
So they spent a lot of time initially in Jerusalem, which was an Ottoman city at this time, and there was no other American presence in the region. They were under the protection of the British consul, who had diplomatic connections with the Sublime Port, with the Ottoman state. And what's interesting is that these Americans, they quickly realized that proselytizing amongst Jewish and Muslim groups was gonna be nearly impossible. There are many socio-political and cultural restrictions on this.
And so they decided to focus instead on the so-called what they called nominal Christians. And so any Christians were not Protestants. Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Maranatic, Greek Catholic communities. Many of these groups of non-Muslim and minorities lived in the Syrian provinces in the Mount Lebanon region.
So it made sense then that the mission would establish its headquarters in Beirut, which is the radical of the Palestinian growing port city at this time, and the press was established there. But Beirut is just one of the many stations that belong to this particular mission. Yeah, I've always, whenever I bring up the fact that Arabic printing had sort of an early phase and multi-people are always a little surprised, and then I'm always like, well, you have all these connections and multis, it's also, it has Arabic in it. So it's always one of those things that I really enjoy was sort of tripping people up with that fact.
Okay, so. Right, the point about Malta is that the first, the presses that were publishing Arabic there before the American mission, were it was the British church missionary society. So they had their past there long before the Americans did in the 1820s. And they're the ones who were actually publishing Arabic books.
The American press themselves, but they didn't really publish Arabic books on it when they were in Malta. It wasn't until they moved to Beirut that they were able to procure an Arabic typeface to begin printing an Arabic. So what drove you to focus on one press versus a constellation of presses, because contemporary to this press in Lebanon is what we often call the press up in, or would lock in Cairo and state printing. And it's contemporary to this period, but it's also a very different project.
So what drove you to focus on this one press? Well, to be honest, I initially conceived of this project as much, much, much larger scale history of Arabic printing. I want to cover everything, in Auk, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, even Istanbul. And of course, that was an ideal.
And when I delve into the research, I realized that each of these projects have very different goals in mind at this particular time. And what drew me to the American press was a little bit of sentiment and talent on my part. I was really happy to find out that this being one of the earliest Arabic commercial presses in the region was actually established by the same people who founded my alma mater, the American University of Beirut. And I realized that the American press was also an important site for serving as the first publisher books by Arab intellectuals, who were non-hostants, like And it's got its very interesting history, and there's a lot of people working on that now.
With the American press, it was a bit of a weird, a weird thing to it, in that it's a missionary press that locals were using to help produce their own works. But these were also locals who were not Muslim and would not have had the same kind of access that Muslim members of Ottoman communities would have had. And so it provided them with this unique opportunity to make a name for themselves in a context where it may have been a little bit more difficult. Yeah, I would like to draw attention to the fact that many people are working on these individual presses right now, and with the press up without, there's a dissertation to the leave-use site, which is by Catherine Schwartz, which hopefully will be in the film.
Which actually makes the same point you do. I read them together and I thought, wow, they make a pretty similar point about rupture and continuity, and the relationship of manuscripts to print culture, but they're doing it in these completely different contexts. And I think you just, people make this great sort of greater methodological contribution. And you read texts similarly, just looking at sort of how they're composed.
So to ask another very broad question, sort of what is the history of the Arabic book prior to this? I mean, we have manuscripts, and many people use them, I mean, traditionally, that's manuscripts are sort of the bedrock of the field of Islamic studies. But how are people consuming books prior to print? How are ordinary people consuming books?
Are they being consumed? What does literacy look like in that sense? And I guess we can talk about Lebanon, but also the greater Middle East. Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question, and one that I'm often asked, because in the history of European book baking, print was taking place centuries before.
And so this idea that you suddenly get the structure in the 19th century, and certainly you had that type of going on in Europe at the time, but it was, but there was a unique case going on in the Arab and Islamic world. Before the more prominent use of print, before print became the main mode of production, as you said, manuscripts were essentially the kind of books that people were producing or circling. Now, the traditional understanding of this is that manuscripts belong to a very, very elite group of readers and producers, often associated in some way with the states, with the on-court or whatever a state we're talking about. And there was this question of accessibility, and this is not necessarily a kind of a way in which knowledge was shared very widely.
And so usually had manuscript workshops where you had in the script or when people were educated in a very hierarchical rigid system, and books were produced for consumption by specific elites and scholarly individuals. Scholars have problematized that particular narrative, people like Dennis Egedy, and then they have no. I told us that, well, there's a consumption of books and book production beyond these rigid elite circles. And you had people who were semi-trained as calligraphers, or may not have been successful calligraphers, and who were producing their own books and who were sharing books in a more popular way.
But despite all of this, it's important to understand that books remain rather to be rather expensive. And we're certainly not affordable as commodities for your average person. And people were in educational systems that were very different before the 19th century. And so it's not true that everybody can read.
There are few people who read. And so it's not just that books were not widely available. It's also that they were not necessarily, there wasn't necessarily a demand for this large amount of, sorry, I'm rambling. So the question of demand and the question of access and all of these issues.
With the emergence of print, it isn't that print changes literacy. I mean, a lot of people talk about how print doesn't each of the change. And I don't necessarily see it that way. Society is what determines how things happen.
It's from society that you get the impetus for social change and for intellectual change. And with modernization reforms, with changes to education, you get more people interested in books, more interested in producing books and consuming books. And with changes to the technology of print itself. I mean, this is something that we don't often talk about.
But the 19th century, it sees changes to actual printing presses. They become a lot more affordable. They become a lot more easier to use. They become a lot more easier to transport.
And this coincides with the change that you see in the nature of the art book at the time. No, I absolutely agree with that. And what I love right now is we're sort of writing a progressive way, I think of it as a progressive way in intellectual history of Middle East, in book history of Middle East, which is history literacy, which is definitely literacy is a tool. We shouldn't necessarily think of it as a social good.
We shouldn't necessarily think of it in terms of progress. But we also shouldn't think of it as this great moment of rupture. And there's a printing revolution all of the most of the sudden, which is one term that has been used to describe printing elsewhere and in the Middle East. And it's definitely something I think about a lot, because there's this temptation to see all these new forms that come with print as revolutionary.
But time, depending on your scope, your temporal scope, you can see change as both rupture and continuity. And that's something that really interests me. So just again, to go back, you mentioned what was happening in Egypt and temporary to this area, the 1830s and what was being printed. And for my knowledge of it, a lot of this information in New mentioned education was to feed into state schools, to create textbooks.
That's also when you have the first printings of the book on. So what is the American press producing? Because as you mentioned, they're a missionary press. So they're not producing the same sorts of texts.
Are they going to the manuscript tradition and printing new books up from those manuscripts? Or are they producing material, are they producing translations? Yeah, so they're doing many things. It all changes.
And I make my book what it does is, again, as I said, it's a very, it's like a slice, a small slice of a big pie that is a history of art printing. And I actually focus on a few decades. Because what I noticed in my research is that what was happening in the 1830s was not necessarily still happening in the 1860s. This is an important period of major socio-political change in the region.
And we see that definitely being negotiated in the context of the American press and its publications. So what the press itself was initially established to produce educational books in Arabic that were meant to be used in the missionary schools and in the seminary. So this is what was going on in the 1830s. The missionaries at that time saw what they perceived to be a posity in Arabic school books.
And so they thought to fill that void for their own purposes. To better serve the mission's vision, though, particularly the vision of the Board of Boston, and that vision that the Board had for its four admissions. The missionaries began to work on an Arabic translation of the Bible. So these missionaries in Beirut argued that the main reason that the press like this was necessary and needed to remain something that the Board funded was that it was where the, they could print the Arabic Bible and associated religious texts that would then be used by catechists.
That these were critical for their proselytizing project. So what's interesting about this press is that from very early on, there's a dual interest in secular and in religious works for use by the mission. Now, what changes over the course of a few years is that the books that the mission prints become more and more the kind of secular works that people who were not interested in converting would purchase and would be interested in reading. And so these kinds of texts were usually the typical educational books, arithmetic, geography, grammars.
They also had a few Arabic translations of evangelical fiction or religious fiction that is not explicitly religious in the sense that the book's stories like the Derry Nance daughter in Robinson Crusoe were translated into Arabic for the local populace. And of course, you have the more religious works. The pilgrims' progress was translated into Arabic and printed there, the Passion of the Christ, many hymnals and soldiers. But as the press evolved, you start to see more and more historical literary, poetic and linguistic texts that were being produced not by the missionaries, but by local intellectuals.
So they would be brought in to produce, to write or translate certain books that had nothing to do really with the missions proselytizing goals. But they would produce these books and then they would be sold within the missions press and the mission press acted as a bookshop of sorts. And what was really interesting is that at some point, the board stops funding this press. And what ends up sustaining the press itself is the fact that local scholars would rent out the press and would use the press, and I believe they would pay the mission, or at least they would hire people at their own expense.
And then they would produce books. And the mission would sell some of them. And the scholars would be able to have books that they would then distribute to other bookshops and magazines in town to sell. So we're going to go even, I mean, we've already described how this is sort of a small slice or a micro history.
And we're going to go even more further in, take more of a microscopic lens, because one of the great accomplishments of this book is its focus on font and typography. And I mentioned to you at some point that I've been talking about your books in July. And one of the conversations that spawned from a mean of friend realizing that we both read your book and discussing it was she works on the history of the physical and the history of the book. And she and I were sitting in a cafe in Cairo and talking about our research today, what we've done.
And she pulls out her phone and she's showing you some pictures of some samples. I'm like, OK, we've got to look on the computer screen. So we look at the font up close. It's not working, just looking on a computer screen.
And we're sitting there marveling over the difference between the fonts of my newspapers that are printed in the late 1880s for that particular week. And her printing of the quote on from across the 19th century. And we're just marveling over the difference in font, how beautiful the font for the quote on was. And at some point someone walked behind us, the owner of the cafe, who knows quite well, and was just like, you guys are nerdy.
You're like marveling over font. Definitely the impact your book had is it talked me the importance of fonts. I never really took it seriously before. I think I always took the material aspect of what I said and quite seriously.
How does someone hold a newspaper? But I never took a consideration like, oh, well, the font looks like this. So it means this. So more specifically, sort of where were these missionaries getting the font from?
Where were, how did font develop with these with this missionary press? So I'm excited about you're talking about the beauty of some of these typefaces that you're looking at. And actually, the aesthetic aspects of typography, in the ninth century, was probably the reason why printed books, or actually, wait, scrap that can we redo? Yeah.
So the aesthetic aspects of typefaces that you're talking about with your friend, this is part of probably one of the reasons why Arabic printing doesn't become popular until the ninth century, when you get improved technology that allow type founders to cast Arabic type, that most closely resembles Caligraphic script. And so the problem with Arabic printing with Arabic typefaces is that the script's an Arabicography is it's hinged upon it being a cursive connected script, right? So unlike English or other line-based languages, you can have gaps between letters. And so in early Arabic printing, and the earliest Arabic printing you get is actually, it's happening in Europe.
What you would see when you look at some of these really early texts from like the 1600s is that there are gaps between the letters, there are little gaps between the letters. That takes away the sort of fluidity that is intrinsic to the beauty of an Arabic script. And now these were essentially casting issues. And it's this one, individual letter forms are cast, and then placed together, there's always going to be these little gaps.
And so this was one of the main problems that the missionaries in the 19th century who were trying to develop Arabic typefaces for this press. This was an issue that they had, and they were trying to work around. Another issue that they had was the vocalization marks, right? So the vowel marks, the marks that you see on the top and bottoms of letters that tell you how that help of pronunciation when you're reading.
And almost every reader would say, well, these are not absolutely important to reading an Arabic text. But for the missionaries who have a rather orientalist understanding of what locals needed to, when reading a book, what they needed to have on that page, they perceive vocalization to be absolutely intrinsic to this. And the problem with that is that, in addition to creating a typeface that had the kind of letter forms that were fluid enough to mimic handwritten scripts that looked connected, they also had to find a way to include these little pieces of metal that would act as vowels. And find a way to arrange them within the typeface that they're setting.
So that way it's printed onto the page. It doesn't look odd. It doesn't look like it just random marks. And these were all two of many technological issues that they were facing.
And so what these American missionaries did initially was that they would take samples of what they considered to be beautiful Arabic scripts. So they would go to collographers, and they would have them produce multiple samples of colligraphy. And then they took these samples to a European type boundary. The first type boundary they used was White's in Germany.
And they tried to cast or design a typeface that was based on these choreographic samples. So that typeface that followed the general rules of Arabic calligraphy, but also found ways to work around the technological hurdles of translating a script into a typeface. I mentioned before that there's a dissertation by a woman by the name of Catherine Schwartz, who who finished her doctorate at Harvard a couple years ago and is now working on the book version of a dissertation. And she works on Egypt and the political economy of print Egypt.
I'm wondering, I really enjoyed the book. But I actually had to sit down and think about the technology that she was writing about is the connection between manuscript and print culture in Egypt actually has to do with lithography. So can you break down lithography for our listeners and then tie it into what was happening in Lebanon because it's quite different, but it has similar results. Yeah, it's similar in the sense that lithography and letter press are both printing technologies.
But I would actually say that's where the similarities end. Lithography is very unique as a mode of printing, because what it does is that it allows a sort of more seamless translation from scribal methods to printed ones. So what lithography essentially is as a method is that you would have a stone, a printing stone. And you can either draw with a crayon, a special crayon, directly onto the stone, or you would draw what you need on treated paper.
You would write what you need on treated paper. And then you would transfer whatever you have on that paper onto the stone, and then you would print that particular stone. And so what that means is that you don't have to work with clunky metal type. You don't have to work with composing lines and placing them in a lot of them into the press and worrying about type deficiencies and worrying about how things are aligned together, because essentially you can maintain the same exact methods that you had in a scribal workshop.
But now you can use them in a new technology. So the same calligrapher who was writing out a manuscript or writing out a text and including certain calligraphic elements would still be able to do the same thing, except now you do it on treated paper that is then printed. Does that make sense? Oh, that makes absolute sense.
And it's one of the reasons actually why I most explain to people that Cairo isn't as important as people think it is important. But it isn't as important as people think it is for printing of Arabic newspapers, because it actually starts much later in Cairo. And one of the reasons why is actually Cairo's important dependent on lithography, whereas in the way you have the precedent of the American press, you have Arabic newspapers coming out as early as 1858 that have longevity, that sort of have this popularity and are able to write away that's at the standards for the region. So it is really important that we understand the difference between these different types of these different technologies.
And it's also another reason why I mean you have this rich tradition in Cairo in the 1860s and 1850s of taking manuscripts and making them into printed books, because you can use the same people who wrote them out to begin with. Exactly. Yeah. And with the in Beirut at the American press, what's really interesting is that they had two lithography machines.
One broke and it was never fixed. Another was fixed, but they did not use it for the purposes of printing books. They used it for maps. They used it for selling carts or schools.
They never actually used it for newspapers or for books or journals in the same way that the press of the lot was used both the letter press technology and with the graphic technology in their productions. And I'm not really quite sure why. It might be diverging attitudes towards lithographic printing in general. Yeah.
I'd also go to the speed that you have as market. There's so many different factors. And this is important. I'm as I said, tie into the history of the book.
It's not just about the book. It's about economic history. It's about cultural history, which is why I think your study was very rich. And I think it would have been very difficult to do this mega project that involved the entire Arabic printing worlds and just do it so well.
And there's so much detail. And the people who work at Europe, the press, really come out as characters. You get a sense of who they are and what they're doing. So I don't want to sort of tip to around this, because you mentioned this in the title.
The word modernity and the concept of modernity is one of the things that the field of Middle East studies generally has had to contend with. What does modernity mean? How do we define it? Do we use the Arabic term for it?
Or do we use the term modernity? Because there's so much theory about what the modern is. And I think what's sort of goes hand in hand as I've referenced this several times over this conversation is the idea of rupture and continuity. It's just the printing press produces huge ruptures.
There are sort of continuum. Is it a bit of both? So I suppose, what are your general thoughts on what modernity is, how we should write about it, and also what people often think about a company's modernity, which is rupture? Right.
I do think that a little bit of both. I think when a consumer joined me as a term, I was a concept truly about progress. And so that in and of itself is about an idea of a rupture with, you know, you define the modern by what came before it, right? It is a need for the structure for what came before.
You know, it's the modernization process that changes mode of production and the social relations to mode of productions and relations of people with each other. I don't see it as a situation as that can be avoided when you're considered in the 19th century, as the era of the great transformation of the spirit, the rise of capitalism that causes a major break. So there's that rupture with mode of production from the past and in the economic system of the past. But as you say, and I argue in my book, that you still see a continuity.
History is not linear in that sense. There is a relationship with the past. And it's an important relationship because in some ways it's a dialectical one. It's how you define what the present is.
And what's interesting about these printed books that you really do see that happening, that's what dialectic taking place on the surface of these pages, where you have conventions that are clearly emulating those of the manuscripts. But they're in printed form. And you have the way that the book is arranged with the inclusion of title pages, with the inclusion of a footnote, some certain other elements that we associate with modern modes of reading. You have that there.
So it's clear that if you put a manuscript and a printed book on the 19th century site to site, they don't look alike. You cannot say that there isn't some rupture going on. There's rupture in the way that they were produced and also the way that they look. But you also have these perennial motifs and this sort of continuity of understanding of what people were expecting when they were looking at a book, what they want what they expect books to look like, how they expect to read them.
The continuity is there. I actually think that's a general principle that one can take away from your book that is really important just to think about with regards to everyday life. I mean, more professionally, academically, I think the same thing about newspapers. Like, you can't argue that a newspaper existed before, in the Arabic speaking context before a certain period.
You can't. There just wasn't the same equivalent. Print really made it possible to mass produce something. Because I think having a general audience and intending to make a general audience is really part of the story.
But what I also think is you look at a newspaper and you're like, ah, that kind of looks like Chronicle writing. Or like the fact that they privileged poetry, Arabic poetry, I sent them around for over a millennia. So there are all these different elements of continuity and change. I think it's also something you can apply to sort of how you think about everyday life.
Is that there aren't these, you know, revolution happens and life doesn't change. Things take time, but also something to change immediately. So as I mentioned multiple times, I absolutely love your book. I came across it because I think it was really an ally for me.
It's something I can sort of both use to inform my own arguments, but also something that I sort of trace the sources, something I can be in conversation with. And I am glad that the history of the book is sort of featuring this revival in Middle East history, in Middle East Studies because all these different fields of history intersect, be it the history of print, art history, the book history, the book history, the intellectual history. And again, your book is sort of a really good example of how one could do almost three or four or five different things at the same time and see them as part of one continuum. So how do you see the relationship between art history, book history, intellectual history?
What should it be? What would you aspire to? Well, yeah, I see intellectual history as the kind of the big umbrella and, you know, smaller, smaller history, book history and so on. Within this, this large umbrella.
And the link, but an important link, where the link that needs to be emphasized here is the methodology. Art history and book history each have their very distinct fields and the very distinct methodologies. Art history, poet's method of visual analysis, while book history, trans-tribular graphic, and literary approaches. But what's really interesting is that, you know, these methods can certainly inform each other and can certainly inform the intellectual history of the book itself.
And this is something that I attempted to do in this book. I mean, we call it interdisciplinary today. But I also feel like interdisciplinary has become too much of a fluid, easy term that you're not really sure what it means at some point. I think it's important to maintain the integrity of each discipline.
But I also think it's equally important to think about the ways in which we can borrow methods from different disciplines and have a much more nuanced approach to an intellectual history of this particular period of the 19th century. So I'm going to do something that is a little unconventional. I want to ask you, if that's out of the purview of your book, let's just jump forward, you know, a century and a half or a century or so. The transition between print to digital text, both sort of generally but also in the specific Arabic context.
What changed? Is it the same sort of big moment of rupture? No, is it a moment of rupture? But is it also this moment of continuity in rupture as we discussed throughout this episode?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, of course, everybody talks about what we have, debates about the death of the book and the digital era and all the stuff in the 80s and the 90s. And so we, most people would say that yes, there is a significant rupture that you have at this point in time. I'm not really sure if it's quite a rupture. I don't, again, it's not something that I work on specifically.
But thinking more broadly about this, I mean, most of production have more or less than the same in sense that we're still a part of a capitalist system, right? And this is the late capitalist period. We still, there isn't this major shift. It's not like the great transformation that we saw at the end of the 19th century in the 20th century.
But you do see a shift in the way in which notions of reading and what books look like are being manifested visually, right? So we get the shift from the surface of the page to the screen. And that's something that definitely requires new ways of understanding text, new ways of thinking about what text needs to look like, what is not thinking about a typeface that is cast in metal, is absolutely not like thinking about how you would represent the typeface in pixels, right? So I mean, you're already dealing with very different technologies here.
And so you do see the kind of disjuncture between these different modes. But at the same time, if you look at the digital text, when the digital was first emerging as a thing, it's remarkable how much some of these things look like or they try to emulate the printed page, right? And it's only more recently that you see more innovations and thinking about new ways of reading and new conceptions of what books are and how we should approach it or how we read. So I just want to congratulate you again on the book.
It is, again, I keep crushing. But it's a phenomenal contribution to the field. It's a really well detailed piece of work. It's nuanced.
It's thoughtful. And I neglected to mention that I believe you won the Mayside dissertation prize a couple of years ago. Well, actually, I'm going to correct you. It was an honorable mention.
Oh, say different. No, please. No, I was an honorable mention in the humanities. I didn't win the first time who works on music and on one.
So it's, yeah. OK, very, very humble of you. But no matter what that's an achievement, because hundreds of dissertations are produced every year. And that your book, that your dissertation was an honorable mention even.
And then the book came out so quickly afterwards and so efficiently and so well done. I just had such an accomplishment. Thank you. Thank you.
So from my last question, we always ask for a teaser. What projects do you have in the pipeline? I'm particularly excited about your work in modern science, actually, science in the Arabic context. Yeah.
I'm actually in a few things that I'm working on. I mean, that's what's so great about finishing up first book. It's always this huge, the albatross around your neck. And you need to get that first book out and get that first bunch of research out.
But now that that's done, I've actually been taking my time and thinking about different things. And one of them, yes, is this idea of modern sciences in the 19th century. And places like Beirut and Cairo. And specifically what I've been noticing, I've been looking at journals, obviously.
And so in a lot of these journals, they were literary scientific journals that many historians have written about, were used as a way to popularize notions of what modern science was. And what I noticed is that in much of the work out there, crazy people talk about the visual conventions. But more importantly, very few people talk about the fact that these are actually illustrated. And illustrations play an important role here, because in the work that I have been doing on the printed book and the earlier printed book, you really don't get a lot of illustrations.
You do occasionally get some illustrations. But they're very far in between. With these periodicals, you have these really interesting gravens. And we know nothing about them.
We have no idea where they came from. We don't know whether we have local people working on these types of engravings. But what it does is it opens up all these questions that you can now ask. And think about wider global connections.
And what I've been finding is that a lot of these illustrations in scientific journals may have been altered locally, but also were coming from European and American sources. And that they were being produced and printed at the same time as similar in similar publications in the West. And so you get an image of Alexander Graham demonstrating his telephone in 1876 in Amoklokov in Beirut. And in that same year, 1877, sorry.
And in that same year, you have a similar article on it in the UK and in the US. And so it really tells us it's a really interesting way to think about questions of contemporinating and what the modern sciences are being utilized by this group of intellectuals to popularize certain ideas about modernity and modernization. I want to read that book now. But again, thank you for spending this time with me.
It's an achievement. I'm really looking forward to hearing more from you in the future. Thank you. Thank you for this.
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